IT Service Management

Are you an IT service management professional interested in developing your knowledge and improving your job performance? Join the IT service management community to access the latest updates from industry experts. Learn and share insights related to IT service management (ITSM) including topics such as the service desk, service catalog, problem and incident management, ITIL v4 and more. Engage with industry experts on current best practices and participate in active discussions that address the needs and challenges of the ITSM community.

Network Managers have a tall order in IT organizations today. Typically, they are tasked with two conflicting business directives:

1. Deliver optimal end-user experience for networked applications

2. Reduce the operational cost of the network, or reduce the IT budget

But the knee jerk approach of “throwing bandwidth at the problem” while potentially improving end user experience, is hardly the answer to cost management and network optimization.

In this webinar, Chris Greer will discuss the challenges that result from the common approaches utilized today in capacity planning and, outline a new way, comprised of 4 actionable steps to optimizing the bandwidth you may already have.

Join us this week for a special 30-minute live session on how RingCentral integrates with Zendesk for improved workflow and increased productivity.

Tune in every Friday for RingCentral Live. We’ll tour the RingCentral interface, discuss the latest innovations and features available on the RingCentral platform, and share best practices on leveraging cloud communications for your business. This session also features a live demo of RingCentral Office and an open Q&A session led by a Sales Engineer.

Sutter Health is a not-for-profit health system serving more than 100 communities in Northern California. Each year its 5,000 physicians care for more than 10 million outpatient visits and discharge more than 200,000 in-patients.

As healthcare systems transition from “fee for service” to “fee for value” reimbursement models, there is an increasing focus to drive down 30-day re-admission rates, particularly for high risk patients. To this end, Sutter Health is piloting Project RED (Re-engineered Discharge) which leverages predictive analytics to identify high-risk patients and then prescribes alternative discharge workflows aimed at lowering the risk of re-admission.

To realize the full benefits of the cloud, you must choose a cloud that fits your needs and supports your organization’s cloud workloads. In this webinar, we will discuss the results of a Forrester Consulting study that show why capacity management is essential to your cloud transformation strategy. You will learn how capacity optimization tools manage workloads in the cloud and help you:

• Gain visibility into capacity utilization at the resource, service, and business level.
• Support timely decision-making on IT investments.
• Increase agility, reduce IT costs, and minimize risks.

Learn how capacity management will help you understand and optimize your environment to support effective decision-making aligned to business priorities.

Link-Solutions is comprised of hand-held test and cloud based reporting. On the hand-held test side LinkSprinter and LinkRunner AT perform varying levels of testing capability but both offer automated reporting to the same Link-Live Cloud Service. Within the Link-Live Cloud Service dashboard you’ll see every test appear on the dashboard as it occurs providing better job visibility and project control as you can easily keep track of who is testing what, where and when. Attend this webcast to find out how this adaptable toolset can help your organization

Gartner has predicted 18-20% growth in SaaS market, and expects it to hit US $22.1 billion by the year 2015. They have also measured that SaaS adoption rate has increased many fold in the last few years (almost 71% of enterprises use SaaS solutions).

SaaS has come a long way from “hype” to “norm”. The key to this change is the confidence that has been built by the cloud/SaaS community by providing enterprise class security. Since, SaaS model of delivery has become a defacto standard of delivering products it’s critical for software providers to ensure that their SaaS product meets the required industry security standards. In this webinar, we will address the security aspects related to architecture, deployment and management of SaaS solutions.

Ineffective new product development (NPD) pipeline management is a condition that affects many organizations looking for sustainable results from their new product efforts. In most cases, organizations struggle to understand what the symptoms they experience are telling them about their pipeline, and how to focus their energy on initiatives that will make the most impact. In this webcast, CA and Kalypso will review the most common indicators of a faulty NPD process and help diagnose the causes.

Attendees will learn:
- The common pain points and symptoms that indicate poor NPD pipeline management
- Why organizations experience these symptoms, and the underlying causes that produce these pains
- How to tailor portfolio management principles to treat the symptoms of poor NPD pipeline management, including example that illustrates how portfolio management can drive sustainable results

Resolving an incident can be a complex process that takes a lot of time and many people. According to the 2014 State of On-Call Report, most teams report that it takes 10-30 minutes to resolve an incident and on average, 5 people are needed to help with resolution.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, Jason Hand will present best practices and tips for surviving every stage of the firefight - from when an alert comes in to pulling reports after it’s over. Join us to see how we do it at VictorOps.

There are more costs to your phone system than you think. From capital expenditures to software upgrades, your phone system could be costing you. Join Matt McGinnis, Senior Director of Product Marketing at RingCentral, as he discusses the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an on-premise phone system and how you can see up to a 70% savings on your phone bill.

Join us for a 30-minute live session every Friday, where we’ll tour the RingCentral interface, discuss the latest innovations and features available on the RingCentral platform, and share best practices on leveraging cloud communications for your business. This session features a live demo of RingCentral Office and an open Q&A session led by a Sales Engineer.

This week tune in and learn about how RingCentral integrates with Google Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more.

The recent (well within last few years) usage of Agile project management approach to deliver business driven requirements faster has presented a few issues to IT Service Management and in particular the integration with ITIL processes. Agile practitioners say of their methodology that it is lean, adaptive, delivering fast and relevant results for the customer through rapid development. In direct contrast, the ITIL practitioner will seek security, availability and stability of a Service through the control and management of change and risk to the live (production) environment. This webinar looks to introduce some of the issues and perhaps suggest some ways to overcome them.

A lack of manpower and a dearth of resources are often major obstacles for organizations striving to achieve and maintain HIPAA and/or PCI compliance. Compliance guidelines are complex and difficult to decipher, even for the most experienced IT professionals. Recent headlines regarding unprecedented security and compliance breaches are causing companies to examine compliance-as-a-service (CaaS) solutions offered by cloud providers. But with the myriad of options available, it’s difficult for companies to discern which CaaS best fits their needs.

Join Johan Hybinette, HOSTING Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), as he discusses the benefits and risks associated with CaaS. Drawing upon his 20+ years’ of experience in information security and compliance, Johan will also offer tips for selecting the right CaaS for your business. Bring your questions and leave with the information you need to confidently invest in a CaaS solution.

Predictive Modeling of Wi-Fi networks is an efficient and cost-effective way to determine ideal quantity, placement, and configuration of APs for optimal security, performance, and compliance. The accuracy of predictive modeling software tools is determined both by the quality of the predictive modeling tool and by the accuracy of the data entered into the tool by the user.

There is now a process by which to gather accurate wall loss data to ensure optimal output accuracy of predictive modeling software, such as AirMagnet’s Planner. The data gathering process involves measurement of wall loss within facilities, but there’s a bit more to the process than one might initially expect.

Attend this webinar to understand the tools and process required to optimize your predictive models for maximum accuracy.

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) - Keeping it all together to make CSI thrive addresses the many elements that perish a CSI plan, program and process. Many organizations are struggling with maintaining an effective CSI process to implement improvements that align with the business priority, manages cost effectively and delivers value. Thriving in CSI addresses the most important elements to succeeding in CSI that are simplified shifts to making CSI work in your organization.

• Addressing the complications, struggles and obstacles of successful CSI.
• Setting up CSI with ITIL® is like setting up a store with no inventory.
• The "PPTC"—People, Process, and Technology Connection to empower the organization to improve.
• Ways to keeping CSI intact to make it thrive.

Why invest time, effort, and political capital to adopt DevOps and PaaS? Chris will compare PaaS capabilities and benefits against IaaS++ Clouds, and describe how tactically extending DevOps processes to Cloud environments accelerates business agility. During the last seven years, DevOps and PaaS have moved from curiosity to mandate. Do the disciplines have a clear future and obtainable payback, or will mainstream adopters become disillusioned by complexity and fragility. In this session, you will learn:

Chris Haddad is an industry thought leader, hands-on practitioner, and SaaS pioneer. Chris has led many successful startup software teams who used agile best practices, rapid iterations, and emerging architecture components to eclipse incumbent providers. He has advised Fortune 500, Global 2000 organizations, and valley startups on software strategies, roadmaps, and best practices. Chris has led the application platform and data management research teams at Gartner, and is an accomplished conference speaker (Gartner Catalyst, SOA Symposium, WSO2Con, and more) whose goal is to make you and your team successful. Chris has written for TechWell.com, OpenSource.com, InfoQ, and GigaOm.

Enterprises still don’t trust the cloud for their sensitive workloads. Are their concerns reasonable? Are they inevitable? In this briefing, Frost & Sullivan examines perceptions and realities associated with cloud security and recommends ways to mitigate risk.

Why You Should Attend:
• Understand the “risk premium” ascribed to the cloud versus the private data center.
• Learn why the cloud requires new processes for governance and compliance.
• Hear why traditional security approaches, such as asset protection, are not relevant to a cloud environment.
• Understand how to build a holistic approach to cloud security.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say. So what type of picture do you have around your disciplines of incident and problem management? Can you see the trends? Can you identify areas for improvements in speed, costs and user experience?

In this session we will discuss some of the results of shifting left and also skipping right to create a dynamic service environment based upon both industry best practices and actionable data.

We will also look at some of the methods and improvements to the Edge SaaS ITSM tool that you can utilize to improve this strategic area of the service desk and IT operations management.

Some of the topics we will cover include:

- How to leverage templates to increase the speed of ticket creation
- Proper alignment between services and SLAs
- Using service notifications to improve messaging and brand
- Creating a problem investigation from an incident
- Developing a process around which incidents should become problems

Following a well-designed Incident Management process is crucial element of what is often referred to as the “Iron Triangle” for IT Service Management. In fact, this process “iron triangle” is “table stakes” for any IT organization—it is not a “nice to have”! Businesses expect their IT organizations to be able to consistently and effectively handle Incidents as well as Requests and Changes. Most organizations start their ITSM journeys by implementing the “iron triangle”, but because they’ve not taken the time to develop their Service Catalog, these critical processes are usually implemented from an IT perspective. So how could having a Service Catalog before implementing Incident Management help? Join Doug Tedder as he discusses five PDG (Pretty Darn Good) ways the Service Catalog enhances Incident Management.

Are you looking for best practices for integrating and implementing solutions more quickly and gaining control over spend, performance and risk? The IT4IT ™ Forum of The Open Group is working to establish open standards for managing the business of IT.

The IT4IT Reference Architecture provides the missing link between industry standard best practices and technology solutions. It provides a foundation for the IT operating model and a blueprint for accelerating IT’s transition to becoming a service broker to the business.

Come learn more about this holistic approach that spans the entire IT lifecycle, with an emphasis on IT Operations.

With more than 100 applications in production, a leading bank needed to reduce the time required to deploy and update its apps. By implementing an automation solution from HP, the bank reduced the application time-to-deploy by nearly 8X. Now the bank follows a seamless and standardized approach for deployment.

Pick up your smartphone, tap a button, and get a lift to wherever you need to go. That’s the idea behind Lyft, the San Francisco-based company whose service is now available in five major metropolitan areas.

“We wouldn’t be able to operate at this capacity without a product like RingCentral,” says Adam Fishman, Director of Growth and Operations. “We needed something that was fast, scalable, and had all the features we were missing.”

With RingCentral, Lyft has realized an exponential growth in productivity, including:

So many companies drown in spreadsheets and duplicate diagrams when trying to document IT infrastructure, but there are better ways. This webinar will cover simple methods and techniques to reduce effort and improve quality of network, data centre and systems documentation. The aim is to achieve a baseline of complex environments which is updated and maintained by change processes.

A powerhouse in the game development community, Epic Games develops cutting-edge games and cross-platform game engine technology. How does Epic manage a highly dynamic infrastructure that supports operations of live content and products?

* How Epic deployed a scalable and highly available cloud services infrastructure to delight online gamers
* The road to cloud and hybrid cloud management
* What delivering “IT as a Service” means for effectively anticipating and meeting business needs
* What’s top of mind as Epic continues to innovate

The scond part of the series -this session will expand on core concepts, showing how to prune out non-critical traffic while focusing on what is important in a trace file. During this webcast, we will examine:
• Wireshark display filters
• TCP Stream Graphs
• Locating slow application response time
• When the network really is to blame
• Measuring network latency
• Using custom columns to isolate key data

Higher education and research institutions have unique needs when it comes to implementing IT Service Management. Many university IT professionals are leveraging industry-specific workflows and tool functionality to maximize their investment as well as streamline processes in their organization. Learn how to extend your ITSM platform to combat challenges such as rapid user turnover, multi-departmental environments, BYOD to improve efficiency and service delivery in your organization.

When organizations are looking at a phone system, they have two paths they can take — upgrading their entire on-premise equipment in each office or evaluate a cloud-based system. Marty Piombo, VP of Partnership Development at RingCentral, discusses what it takes to transition to a phone system in the cloud and the benefits it can provide.

Please join best selling author, Shep Hyken as he discusses how customer service expectations have been drastically altered by the rise of social media. He will share his tips to successfully win the hearts of customers through social engagement. We will review how to successfully balance a reactive and proactive social media approach to address customer’s needs in real-time and help foster revenue growth year-over-year. Join to discuss:

•Customer Service expectations in an expanding social world
•Reactive vs Proactive social customer service strategies
•How to build a company and team that excels through social media

Plus we will have Q/A running throughout the event, so please come with your questions and social engagement tips!

In today’s online and mobile environment, financial service organizations are struggling to comply with a multitude of regulatory requirements that impede online and mobile customer signups. What is the best way to signup customers while still complying with regulations and mitigating fraud?

Join us for a live webinar, “Optimizing customer signup flows in your mobile and web channels” and listen in as experts in ID authentication and identity verification discuss various strategies that will help you:

Don’t loose another customer because you can’t offer a real-time sign-up process through your online and mobile channels. Join us and learn how to optimize your sign-up flows, and enable anytime, anywhere through any digital channel customer account opening.

IT Service Management systems are great collectors of stuff – requests, changes, survey results, etc. What they’re not so great at is sorting out what is most important and helping us to act on it! That is until HP Service Anywhere.

Join us in this session to see how HP Service Anywhere helps end users act on their needs, their assets; agents act on requests, incidents, changes, and releases.

Find out how Service Anywhere helps transform the way IT service desk agents work – boosting service quality and increasing productivity – all powered by a big data platform, provide high scalability and rapid processing of unstructured and structured data to deliver current and relevant information.

Join us to learn how the industry’s first Big Data service desk delivers service insights once thought impossible.

Join Ntirety, a division of HOSTING and the leading data services organization in the country, in this discussion of the impact that database administration can have on individuals, organizations and — most importantly — bottom line revenue. This interactive webinar will cover:
•DBA Burnout and Retention
•The DBA’s Role in Major Platform Shifts and Regulatory Compliance
•The Accidental DBA Due to Staff and Skills Shortages
•The “Half a DBA” Problem -- When You Don’t Need a Full-time DBA
•The IT Budget Crunch
•Q & A

Join us this week for a special 30-minute live session on how RingCentral integrates with Zendesk for improved workflow and increased productivity.

Tune in every Friday for RingCentral Live. We’ll tour the RingCentral interface, discuss the latest innovations and features available on the RingCentral platform, and share best practices on leveraging cloud communications for your business. This session also features a live demo of RingCentral Office and an open Q&A session led by a Sales Engineer.

DevOps is driving the evolution of Service Management. The nimble, yet integrated execution of a DOSM (DevOps Service Management) strategy requires a thoughtful and holistic automation architecture. This session takes a high level look at the building blocks.

Coldwell Banker Mid-America Group is a real estate brokerage with approximately 200 agents in central Iowa. Recently the company switched from an expensive Avaya PBX system to a RingCentral cloud communications solution. Director of IT Paul Clowser says, “Agents now have much more control over their needs without having to contact IT.”

Whether your organization in the middle of a long running ITIL implementation that is failing to deliver the benefits or you are playing with DevOps to solve the problems of continuous innovation that ITIL doesn't solve, it is clear the ITIL framework must evolve.

This webcast focuses on the current state of ITIL in today’s IT-enabled businesses and explores some of the challenges ITIL faces as businesses demand more agility and rapid-time-to-market from their IT organizations, and why there’s hope for ITIL.

This session is approved for 1 priSM Professional Development Unit (PDU) credit.

If your organization is reliant on a rapidly aging version of SQL Server, you need to join SQL Server experts Michael McCracken from HOSTING and Rodney Landrum, a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, from Ntirety for this in-depth discussion of the hows, whys and whats of upgrading from Microsoft SQL Server 200X to SQL Server 2014. The interactive webinar will cover:
•The benefits of upgrading
•Considerations to understand
•How to smooth the transition
•Q & A

Do you have network performance monitoring tools, but you still can’t figure out what the problem is? Are you experiencing VERY expensive downtime, resulting in customer churn? Do your IT organizations spend all their time pointing fingers? Do you want it to end? Attend this webinar on how to accelerate the mean-time-to-repair for network performance problems, without an actual war in the war room.

The classic ITIL model includes a process function for SACM – Service Asset and Configuration Management, but what does SACM include? What is the scope of Configuration Management? What is the scope of IT Asset Management? Where is the overlap? What are the dependencies? Most importantly, how does ITAM strengthen ITSM and how does ITSM strengthen ITAM?

- ITAM / CM Information Consumers and Providers - The 5-box model
- When is a single instance of hardware or software an asset? A CI? Both? Neither?
- What informational attributes provide value for the IT asset? For the CI?
- Where does the information (data) come from and how does it get into the asset record? CI?
- The cradle to grave lifecycle of hardware and software in the business environment
- Communication 101
- Keys to success – How do we exceed our expectations for ITAM / CM?

Service desk KPIs have evolved and matured significantly over the past two decades. Today’s service desks routinely track twenty or more KPIs, and the focus has shifted from tactical/operational metrics to the more strategic metrics of business value and ROI. In this session, you’ll take a journey through the past and explore twenty-five years of service desk benchmarking data. Attendees will learn about the most common service desk KPIs, changing averages in service desk performance, the evolution of KPIs, the holistic discipline of performance measurement and management, and what today’s KPIs tell us about the future.